Re: A WoD dev blog

I thought about this and have a question now, if there's a bar-style shield gauge on the HUD, does this mean shields will now be single-section instead of a quadrant shield? Or does the bar display its relative strength by total points, as in 0/150/150/250 of 1,000 is a 55% filled bar?

There's also about four hours until the second anniversary by the release post's timestamp, so here's to more awesome WoD development.

Re: A WoD dev blog

It's based off of total shield energy. But there's a script that auto balances the player's shields (which can be toggled with Alt+Q), so its like only the player has a single segment shield. Everything else has normal shield quad mechanics.

If you turn off the auto equalization and a shield quad goes below 5%, the shield bar sort of hollows out letting you know that "yo dude, shields may not be effective".

Re: A WoD dev blog

Re: A WoD dev blog

With how low TTK is in WoD I don't think you'll have too much time to check your shield strength gauge before you just die when you **** up and let someone get behind you. Though it's still a pretty cool addition and a bar-type indicator is much more readable than the opacity-based quadrant strength in the default HUD.

Re: A WoD dev blog

Depends on what you're flying. In the test runs, I've found that MCWS are remarkably survivable if you take advantage of your slide controls. Better still, the Zervium and Verian have hitscan beam weapons so no amount of lateral maneuvering can throw off your aim - just point them directly at the enemy and shoot.

Re: A WoD dev blog

The Zervium does lose a turnfight against a Ray3 though, if only slightly. So it's possible to simply stay out of its firing line. And yes, by manoeuvring you can make yourself dodge pretty much any non-hitscan primary.

Though you can still get from full health + full shields to dead in 4.7 seconds against 6 banks of the VK01N and no secondaries. Get hit by some point-blank darts or DRPs and that can easily go under 3 seconds.

Re: A WoD dev blog

Well, the UGC Vulture is in game, with the dubious honor of being the first and probably the only fighter that has thruster bitmaps for rotating and strafing and the like. And boy, what a ride that turned out to be. You see, the way these $Thrusters are defined in the tables did not exactly align with what I considered to be... logical.

This seems easy enough right? Now, let's get a picture from the interwebs so we're all on the same page:

Now in their infinite wisdom thought a bit differently about how these terms are used. The Roll keys are labeled as Bank in the FS2 control keyconfig. While Yawing is Turn. So okay, weird, but this is the same developer that labeled the biggest capitalship as destroyers and the smallest ones as cruisers, while the inbetween is a frigate and a corvette. So hey, not the first time terms are used a bit differently from the norm.

So I got started with assigning the rcs thrusters in the table entry. The thruster on the top right and bottom left should fire if the ship rolls right, so I'd assign 'Roll right' to these. Now if the ship would slide to the right, I would want the thrusters on the left to engage. When the ship turns right... that would be banking, right? So the thrusters on the left would fire if the ship Banks right.

Ha! Joke is on me. None of these were true.Cause you see. Banking is rolling. Rolling is turning. Slide right is actually Slide left. But then 'Roll right' and 'Roll left' don't follow that reverse logic of the Slide.

Makes perfect sense right? When none of the terms in the tables actually correspond to their actual movement and directions are reversed willy nilly. And the only real way to figure it out involves trial and error. Edit table, start up game, see what actually works, edit table, start up game. Rinse and repeat.So boy, was I bamboozled trying to make any sense of this.

Good times.

But hey, here it is ingame:Shooting so many guns at once feels good though. The ship has a unique way of shielding that sets it apart from other fighters. Its shield mesh only covers the front end. The back and sides are completely unshielded. So the pilot has to keep facing its opponent at all times to keep its strong frontal shield to the incoming fire. (The AI is remarkably good at this, with the right ai profile) It's afterburner only provides a short 2 second speed burst and overclocking the engine doesn't give you that much of a boost.

The Zervium does lose a turnfight against a Ray3 though, if only slightly. So it's possible to simply stay out of its firing line. And yes, by manoeuvring you can make yourself dodge pretty much any non-hitscan primary.

Though you can still get from full health + full shields to dead in 4.7 seconds against 6 banks of the VK01N and no secondaries. Get hit by some point-blank darts or DRPs and that can easily go under 3 seconds.

The Ray3 rotates 2.9 2.9 2.9 vs 2.4 2.4 3.0 of the Zervium, if the Zervium loses this turnfight, its on the pilot!

I'll take a look at the TTK and tweak if necessary, those numbers you say seem a bit on the low end for what I want the player's survival time to be.

Re: A WoD dev blog

My numbers are on the low end because I am good at this game so I tweaked both the ai-profiles.tbm and ai.tbl to make the TTK lower.With the release version a wingman-average Ray3 with 6 VK01Ns would need 7.01 seconds to 100-0 you because it has a 1.2 fire delay scale and the player has a 0.8 damage scale. I momentarily forgot that my version is edited since I did that over a year ago.

Realistic TTK with missiles involved should be around 6 seconds which seems long enough. The player's TTK is around 3 seconds against most Terran fighters, it seemed only fair that the AI should be able to do the same to you.

[22:29] <sigtau> Hello, #hard-light? I'm trying to tell a girl she looks really good for someone who doesn't exercise. How do I word that non-offensively?[22:29] <RangerKarl|AtWork> "you look like a big tasty muffin"----<batwota> wouldn’t that mean that it’s prepared to kiss your ass if you flank it <batwota> wow<batwota> KILL

Re: A WoD dev blog

While I wasn't particularly a fan of flying it in old WoD, I always really liked the Kaze's design. It's nice to see it getting some love here. I'll probably like flying it more upgraded, and it looks great in that colour scheme too.